Bibliotrek

This is the best sea­son of Mad Men yet.

Episode 7 was absolutely shat­ter­ing, in all the best ways. Watch­ing the char­ac­ters pick up the pieces and go on with their lives after this should pro­vide fas­ci­nat­ing and incred­i­bly poignant moments for the rest of the sea­son, and indeed the rest of the series.

I ‘m being vague because I want to avoid spoil­ers for any­one who hasn’t seen it, but holy cow, I cer­tainly wasn’t expect­ing any­thing of this emo­tional mag­ni­tude until the sea­son finale. This makes me all the more excited for the future.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if Shake­speare were liv­ing today, he’d have fina­gled a place on the Mad Men writ­ing team. Don Draper may be the clos­est thing to a Shake­spearean tragic hero that the 21^st cen­tury has seen so far. The show has never made any secret that it’s about the tragic fall of Don Draper (hello, open­ing cred­its!), but this whole sea­son has been show­ing us just how far Don has fallen.

And at the end of last night’s episode, we might have seen a bit of respite, but the ques­tion that remains is whether Don still has more to lose and fur­ther to fall. Does he need to sink to Duck’s level, for exam­ple? Or his own father’s? Or is this his nadir?

I’m will­ing to bet it’s not.